2 Guys, 1 Mocksup - The Mocksup blog

We’re moving hosts this weekend

This year our host has been the sole cause of all of our unplanned downtime — with multiple unplanned maintenance incidents this month alone. We plan on addressing that problem by changing hosts. We will be making the transition to a new, full-service host this weekend, August 21st – August 22nd.

Ideally, you’ll need to do nothing, and won’t even notice that we’ve moved. We’ll be doing our best to ensure that everyone’s experience is as seamless as possible. We will be redirecting traffic from the old host to the new host, while DNS servers around the world are informed of our move. It’s possible that the application will “feel slow” if you use it this weekend.

If you have any issues at all during this transition, please don’t hesitate to let let us know via our support form.

Mocksup had a doozie of a July

July started off with our huge update and some great press and ended with Mocksup having our biggest month ever in terms of traffic, interest and new subscribers.

In fact, we’re closing out July with 3 times (!) as many paid subscribers as we had in June. Which is just about the best news we’ve ever heard here at Mocksup HQ. (You like us, you really like us!)

Thanks so much to everyone who visited, signed up, emailed, upgraded, tweeted and blogged about us this month. We’re working on even more great updates for August and hope to be writing this same kind of blog post and the end of next month.

Mocksup’s crazy week

Last week we launched our biggest update in the almost one year history of Mocksup. It received a fair amount of attention — vaulting to the top of startup and programming site Hacker News, onto Yahoo!’s Delicious Popular page and all over Twitter — netting us by far our busiest week ever traffic wise and some pretty darn flattering blog coverage:

Mocksup is the slickest mockup tool we’ve seen yet

We get a lot of requests from developers, designers and other creative types who are looking for things to make their jobs easier. It isn’t often that I’m able to really help with that, so when @Zee pointed me to Mocksup, I knew that I had to tell you about it…

How to Build a Quick, Clickable Website or iPhone App Prototype

It’s a cool combination of digital wireframing and WYSIWYG website creation. It might also be the only online app that supports clickable iPhone app prototyping.

One of the best things about all the attention was the useful feedback we got from new users that we’ll soon start working into future releases. Thanks to all those who took the time to drop us a support request or suggestion.

Thanks again for everyone’s support and here’s to many more weeks like last week!

Recent updates: iPhone support, notes, a new look and lots more

We received so much positive feedback from the changes we made earlier this week that I wasn’t able to finish writing about it until today.

And, even then, so many things have been added or updated that I can’t really go in-depth about each one. But, I’ll go ahead and quickly list them all out.

• All new marketing design (including this fancy new blog!) and a better organized, tighter admin area UI.
• Support for iPhone mockups. This is a biggie, we’re the first webapp to support iPhone prototyping. We’re really proud of this feature. Give it a try.
• Added the ability to control not only the horizontal, but also the vertical alignment of any mockup. Making it possible to center anything, from banner ads to illustrations to photos.
• Notes, a new way to leave feedback on specific parts of a mockup. Now, you can either be general with your feedback or use notes to highlight every gritty detail.
• Can now view both your current version’s comments as well as every past version’s archived comments. This makes it much easier to see what has already been said about older versions of your designs.
• Better control over your version history. Now if you have a small change that you don’t want saved as an entirely new version, just click the checkbox when you upload the new version and it will overwrite the old version instead of save a new one.
• Mockup specific settings, allowing you to have different backgrounds and alignment for the entire project, just like before, but also from mockup to mockup. This is really good for multiple versions of a project’s new design that all need different backrounds, or for a project that combines website designs, banner ad designs, illustrations, etc. all together.
• And tons of other behind the scenes, super detailed stuff, that probably only we notice but that has made Mocksup a better product.

Wow, we should’ve released this thing in chunks, huh? But, now that it’s finally done, we hope you find it even more useful than before. Throughout the next couple of weeks we’ll have blog posts diving into more detail about specific features.

Until then, there are still a few kinks that we’re ironing out, so if you have a problem with any of the new stuff or a suggestion for how a feature might be even better please do drop us a note.

It’s all in the details

When you use an app everyday, you notice all the little things that could work better. Alone, none of them are big enough to make you write into support or stop using the product. But every now and then you’ll think to yourself, “Man, I wish they’d fix that…”

When you also happen to build the product that you use everyday — like we do with Mocksup — you’re the “they”, and if you don’t fix it, it ain’t gonna get fixed. All those little annoyances go into a “Someday/maybe” list and — once all the big stuff is out of the way — knocking a few things off that list is really satisfying.

That’s what we got to do this week. Most of you might not have even noticed, but we certainly did:

• Better feedback: A lot of the times when you did something in the admin — like send notifications or update your settings — you weren’t really sure if anything happened. Now at the top of the toolbar you get the helpful updates you always should have (i.e. “Your notifications were successfully sent” or “Your settings were successfully saved”, etc.)

• Prettier buttons: The default browser buttons were looking really out of place in the Mocksup admin, so we prettied them up quite a bit.

• Smarter comment area: When you minimize the admin sidebar it remembers it’s on/off state from page to page. But if your project had a dozen or more mockups and you needed to minimize just the comment area so you could see them all, it wouldn’t remember that when you went to the next page. That was really starting to get on our nerves, so we fixed it!

And don’t worry, these little changes aren’t all that we’ve working on. More soon!

Updated Help & Support

Over the weekend we switched our Help & Support pages from the hosted solution Tender to a simpler, homegrown solution of a FAQ combined with a contact form.

If you have any problems, questions or suggestions please don’t hesitate to send us a note. If it’s something we feel like other people have also wanted to know or could benefit from knowing, we’ll add it to the FAQ.

Spring forward

This morning we shipped out a big update to Mocksup. Here’s a quick summary of what’s new.

Adding notes to invitations

One of our most requested features has been the ability to add notes to invitations. That way, when you invite someone new to a project, you can personally explain what Mocksup is and what kind of feedback you’re looking for.

More easily manage contributors

Starting a new project and having to remember all the email addresses of everyone you’d already invited to other projects was a hassle.

Now, as long as you have contributors on other projects, when you go to “Manage contributors” you’ll see a list of all your previous contributors. Just select the emails you want for your current project and send out your invitations.

Send out notes whenever you need to

Mocksup desperately needed the ability to “ping” your contributors about the latest updates. Now, after you’ve uploaded a new version or added a new mockup to a project, you can send out a quick note — with a link to the project — letting everyone know what’s new.

Help!

Mocksup is now integrated with Tender to provide top-of-the-line help pages and discussion forums. If you’ve run into a bug or have an idea for a feature just click the “Help” link in the top right and let us know about it.

Finer-grained control over linkboxes

Previously, when adding lots of links all in a row for something like navigation, unless you had the steady hands of a brain surgeon the linkboxes would be all out-of-line and different sizes.

Now you can select a linkbox and, down in the lower left corner of the editor screen, invidually set its x and y-coordinates as well as its width and height. For the perfectionist in all of us this makes for a much nicer looking list of navigation links.

Lots more little stuff

We’ve also fixed a bug in our linkboxes that sometimes caused them to line up out of place. We’ve improved the interface in several places (I couldn’t believe how much we needed a “Back to dashboard” button until I started using it everyday). And, hopefully, in general just made the app a little snappier and easier to use. Thanks for reading and, as always, your feedback is welcome.

Mocksup buzz from around the interwebs

It’s been a busy couple of weeks here at Mocksup headquarters.

We turned on paid accounts last week (more on that in another post), we just gave the blog a fresh coat of HTML and CSS and we’ve been getting linked to from all over the place:

• Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain somehow found out about us back in February and mused aloud “[i]magine being able to easily browse every version of every mockup you’ve ever created, as well as everything that was ever said about them.” I know, right? I might be biased, but that sounds pretty awesome.

• CSSMania thought our design was noteworthy enough to earn a mention.

• Killer Startups titled us a “smooth approach to mockups.”

• For better or worse we were part of FeedMyApp’s “daily dose of Web 2.0.” Might be time to update the tagline, guys.

• We wound up in the Productivity category over at Cloudomatic.

• And last, but certainly not least, we’ve been mentioned all over the Twitters. Oftentimes in languages we don’t understand.

So, many thanks to everyone who’s visited over the last several weeks. Please do come back early and often. We’re just getting started.

Announcing our Public Beta

About six months ago, Mocksup got its start during the Rails Rumble. We were ambitious about what we could accomplish in a weekend, but at the end of contest, we both wanted to proceed and finish the job we had started. Right now, we are calling Mocksup a public beta.

In addition to adding features and fixing bugs, we’ve been refining and polishing the product in those six months.  We think there’s a lot to be proud of, but some rough edges definitely remain.  Never hesitate to reach out to us through the Feedback mechanism on the website or via Twitter.  We’ll have a more official support medium soon.

Your feedback is important to us.  Some of it has validated ideas that we had already planned to add.  Other parts we’ve already been able to act on.  I hope that you’ll continue to discover, explore, and use our features while we offer free use of our product.

We won’t be free forever.  We have completed some of the necessary paperwork to begin charging for our service, and we expect that process to conclude relatively soon.  After we’re satisfied with our payment infrastructure, we’ll begin charging for Mocksup.

Our promise to you is that you will not see a degradation in service in any way when we begin charging.  If you are exceeding any limits for the free plan, we will begin a free trial period for you, and provide messaging through e-mail and the website about what you can do to remain uncharged without potentially losing access to a project you’ve started.

We think the future looks bright for Mocksup; our users so far seem to enjoy using the service as much as we’ve enjoyed producing it. Thanks so much for your supportive tweets and blog posts about us. We want to be the exciting new site that you recommend to your friends, so please keep us in mind.

A look back at the past month

Mocksup went live with its new design and greatly improved functionality a little over a month ago. Since then we’ve been busy. Here are some of the highlights:

• We saw over 2500 unique visitors in the month of February. That’s up from less than a hundred visitors every month previous (even though we didn’t really want visitors those previous months and shut off signups for a while — but still, February was a big month).

• We pushed more than half a dozen big improvements: better comment formatting and notification of new comments, contributors can now use the link in their invitation email to login indefinitely (instead of just once), you can now delete a project (as well as a background image from a project), the way we handle positioning the links you create is much improved. And there’ve been dozens more tiny fixes. Plus, we made several important changes to the marketing site: new logo, new tour, a new features page and a better demo.

• We received tons of great feedback — some we’ve already acted on and others we’ve made todos for — and gained several new followers on Twitter.

• We started the process of becoming a corporation. This means sooner than later we’ll start offering a premium plan with better performance, even more great new features and, of course, world-class support.

So, thanks to everyone who made February our first breakout month. Please do keep using the product and providing feedback while we’re in beta. And we’ll keep working hard in the background to continue helping you make more of your mockups.